Obstacle avoidance systems may be used to augment the performance of human operators of vehicles or for autonomous or unmanned vehicles. A reactive obstacle avoidance system may use local data of a vehicular environment to generate a control output for steering a vehicle to avoid an obstacle. However, a reactive obstacle detection system may be prone to delayed reaction or indecisiveness when computations approach boundaries, discontinuities, local maxima, or local minima. If a vehicle is presented with an obstacle directly in its path of travel, and the obstacle detection algorithm struggles with the computations associated with boundaries, discontinuities, local maxima, or local minima, the likelihood of a collision may increase markedly. Thus, there is need to expedite the search or solution for a suitable obstacle avoidance path to avoid a potential collision with the obstacle.